With production flourishes from Mark Ronson, Josh Homme leads the band's most accessible album in decades.

Aug 30, 2017

They don’t make anti-heroes like Josh Homme anymore. The Queens of the Stone Age mastermind is not so much a musician as he is the all-American badass incarnate. His is a persona shaped by the blasphemous gospel of your typical truck stop bathroom stall: white lies by day, regular Johns by night, and of course, drugs by the songful. Just like the Gadsen—the spirit animal for the live-free-or-die crowd—Homme would rather eat dirt than bow to anyone else’s standards, musical or otherwise. His stark commitment to independence (and by extension, his open embrace of the subversive) fueled the Queens’ rise to infamy at the tail end of the 1990s. With its abundance of soft, lilting vocals and coolly-phrased fury, 1998’s debut Queens of the Stone Age bravely, subtly defied hard rock’s arch-masculine roots, putting a refreshingly witty spin on a genre regarded by many as brutish and boneheaded. The name says it all...